My Opinion on Bouyancy Control

Some people say that learning bouyancy is the hardest part of learning to SCUBA dive. I agree with them. I still have not learned bouyancy and never will because I do not think that you can truely learn bouyancy. I say this becuase I have been told I am a natural at bouyancy and all I can do is smile and agree. This is because I never focused on bouyancy when I learned how to SCUBA dive. Bouyancy to me is just something that happens when we are underwater.

When I think about bouyancy I think about staying off the bottom but being plenty close to the bottom to see everything that I could possibly want to see. To me bouyancy is just something that happens. When you SCUBA dive you should be constantly breathing. Constanly inhaling and exhaling changes the overall density of your body. This change in the density of you body makes it easier for you to float or sink. If you breathe in you are making yourself less dense. Being less dense makes water want to be under you because it is more dense. If you exhale you let the air that expanded in your lungs and made you less dense go. You are now more dense and because of that you sink because the water under you is now less dense than you are. The ability to control to a degree that you do no thit the bottom or rise to the surface is bouyancy in SCUBA diving.

Bouyancy in my opinion is hard, if not impossible to learn, becaue bouyancy is control over how much you breathe and the overall density of your body. I for one never learned bouyancy control in my opinion I just learned that if I pay attention to how much I breathe I can be at whatever depth in the water that I want to be. Learning this allowed me to be called a natural at bouyancy, and now I hardly touch my BCD. Even when I am done with a dive I usually do not touch my BCD until I am at the depth I want to stay at for a while. That depth may be a saftey stop and it may be the surface. One thing is for sure though, because I use that little bit of my mind to keep track of my breathing/bouyancy I am able to stay down longer, and not waste air on my BCD. That is bouyancy control to me.